1

Introduction

In which current understandings of site-specific performance and critical per

ceptions from within and beyond the field of theatr e studies are detailed; and
a set of distinctions between auditorium and site are proposed as a provisional
point of departure.

Although the search for a practicable, encompassing definition of site-specific

performance has long claimed scholarly attention, it remains slippery. In 1998
Patrice Pavis proposed:

This term refers to a staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place
in the real world (ergo. outside the established theatre). A large part of the
work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued
with history or permeated with atmosphere: an airplane hangar, unused factory,
city neighbourhood, house or apartment.The Insertion of a classical or modem
text in this 'found space' throws new light on it, gives it an unsuspected power,
and places the audience at an entirely different relationship to the text, the place
and the purpose for being there.This new context provid es a new situation or
enunciation ... and gives the performance an unusual setting of great charm and
power. (Pavls, 1998, pp. 337-8)

Pavis's observations relate specifically to practices originating in theatre:

'the play-as-event belongs to the space, and makes the space perform as much
as it makes actors perform' (Wiles, 2003, p. 1). Shortly after, in the keynote
volume Site-Specific Art Per{ormance, Place and Documentation (2000), Nick
:teaye atll!ffifs to a broader range of forms, stemming from both dramatic and
visual art traditions. His characterization of site-specific art as 'articulate
exchanges between rhe work of art and the places in which its meanings are
defined' (Kaye, 2000, p. 1) sustains. He resists distinguishing common features
within a putative genre, focusing upon process rather than object, and upon
the relationship between 'an "object" or "event" and a position it occupies';
' ... Indeed, a definition of site-specificiry might begin quite simply by describ
ing the basis of such an exchange' (ibid.).
Since the publication of Site-Specific Art related scholarship has burgeoned.
Amongst many commentators, Miwon Kwon has extended Kaye's concern with
visual art practices and ]en Harvie, Dee Heddon, Gay McAuley, Misha Myers,
Heike Rams, Cathy Turner and Fiona Wilkie have all written substantively
on performance. Most note a change in practice over the past ten years: from
 8 SITE.SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE

fixity ro mobility; from architectonic to peripatetic manifestations; from ex{!o

sitiollal to relatio11al modes; from 'the spectacular re-enactment to the quiet
intervention, from remedial collaboration to dialogic, open-ended process'
(Doherry,1004,p. 11); and from general categorization -'site-determined', 'site
referenced','siteconscious','siteresponsive', 'contextspecific' - to closer scru
tiny of the specificity of each instance of performance. Daniel Libeskind's long
lists of types of space - food space, interesting space, racist space, forgotten
space, etc.- alerts us to both the folly and potential of classification as his stu
dents are asked to 'materialize, create, investigate, illuminate, construct, touch,
redeem' spaces thus defined (Libeskind, 1001, pp. 65-8).
In her survey of site-specific performance in Britain, what she terms 'interven
tions into cultural spaces', Fiona Wilkie wrestles with 1)1/a/ag;;t.whilsr admitting
that few instances are ever distinct and discrete. She identifies site-sympathetic
(an existing performance text physicalized in a selected sire); site-generic (per
formance generated for a series of like sires); and site-specific (performance
specifically genera:d from/for one selected sire (Wilkie, 1001a, p. 150).
Bur at base she appreciates rhe reciprocal instrnme11tality or affordance
offered by the relationship: 'sire-specific performance engages with sire as
symbol, site as story-teller, site as structure' (ibid., p. 158). 'Layers of the sire
are revealed through reference ro: historical documentation; sire usage (past
and present); found text, objects, actions, sounds, ere.; anecdotal guidance;
personal association; half-truths and lies; sire morphology (physical and vocal
explorations of site}' (ibid., p. 150). And she challenges notions of easy congru
_,
enoe between performance and site: 'that rhe "fir" may not be a comfortable
-...: merging with the resonances of the sire but might be a reaction against them'
CO (ibid., p. 149).
Wilkie canvasses companies and individuals. Brighton-based Red Earth
describe their work as 'inspired by and designed to integrate with the physi
cal and non-physical aspects of a specific location' {ibid., p. 149). Dartington
artist and academic Sue Palmer comments: 'it's not just about a place, but the
people who normally inhabit and use that place. For lr wouldn't exist without
them' (ibid., p. 145).
In subsequent research, Wilkie identifies two broad developments in prac
rice: 'a shift in form (from itthabiting to journeying), and a shift in the nature of
inquiry (from tbis place to broader questions of site)' (Wilkie, 1008, pp. 100-1}.
That is, from attention to the cultural resonances of one particular sire, to
an active rethinking of how 'sire' is constituted - 'how art, and in our case
performance creates a space of encounter'; 'Questions of what and how sire
"means" are teased apart' (ibid., p. 101 ). 'A shift in form can be noted from
performance that inhabits a place to performance that moves tbrougb spaces';
'from a concern with the political and cultural meanings of particular loca
tions to a focus on broader questions of what site as a category might mean'
(ibid., p. 90).
Rather than simply occupying an 'unusual setting', site-specific perform
ance is adjudged ro hold 'possibilities for responding to and interrogating a

I I I __ ?'1 \L 01 _/!-
__-_ _ ]([_

Jili, ]till-
.l-, :m"'- '
m
]I:, :11 'ff,!f_, __
 INTRODUCTION 9

range of current spatial concerns, and for investigating the spatial dimension
of contemporary identities' (ibid., p. 89), representing 'formal and aesthetic
but also political choices' (ibid., p. 96). Not only does the use of non-theatre
venues contribute to 'an enquiry into what theatre is a11d might be', it also
incorporates 'a set of productive spatial metaphors, whereby practitioners use
their focus on geographical space to explore a range of theatrical, conceptual,
political and virtual spaces. Thus the potentially restrictive speci(icity of the
work is expanded to allow for ambiguity and multiplicity' (ibid., p. 100).
Of the initiative in Scotland to create a devolved national institution, she

I
opines that 'site-specificiry offers a convenient marker of a set of ideas with
which the National Theatre of Scotland wants to be associated: experiment,
iiCceSsib1lity;-thrconnectton berween art and everyday life, and a sh1ft away /
from the primacy of the metropolitan theatre building' (ibid., pp. 87-8).
Jen Harvie indicates the potential of site-specific performance 'to explore 1
spatial and material histories and to mediate the complex identities these his
tories remember and produce' (Harvie, 2005, p. 44):

Site-specific performance can be especially powerful as a vehicle for remember

ing and forming a community for at least two reasons. First. its location can work
as a potent mnemonk trigger, helping to evoke specific past times related to the
place and time of performance and facilitating a negotiation between the mean
ings of those times. (ibid., p. 42)

Second, it is effective for 'remembering and constituting identities that are sig
nificantly determined by their materiality and spatialiry, identities to do with,
for example, class, occupation, and gender' (ibid.).
With regard to the Welsh context, Heike Roms retorts: 'it was frequently
not the locations thar invested the performances with a sense of identi, as
Harvie proposes, but the erformances that made these locations and hist

associated with diem re resentaf entity oms, 2008, p. 115}.

For Roms, contemporary site-specific performance may involve a 'perceived
potential to bring into correspondence the place of representation and the rep
resented place in an attempt to create theatre work that expresses particular
localized concerns' (ibid., p. 111), encouraging 'a different kind of audience
performer interaction' (ibid., p. 116).
Within an Australian context, Gay McAuley (2006, 2007) again outlines
a schematic typology. Her first category of practice seeks in non-traditional
sites 'those physical features and aesthetic qualities needed for a particular
production', with the proviso that site 'may begin to tell its own story' (2007,
p. 8). The second category entails engagement with a particular community.
And the third category emerges from a particular place: 'it engages intensively
with the history and politics of that place, and with the resonance of these in
the present' (ibid., p. 9).
Whilst her preferred designation 'site-based' refers to performance 'in found
spaces rather than in designated theatre buildings' (ibid., p. 7), in which site

\j)
 becomes the dominant signifier rather than simply being that which contains
rhe performance, she is conscious of irs capacity to enhance a 'deeper under
standing of the spatialised nature of human culrure' (ibid., p. 7), 'changing the
way people perceive places' (2006, p. 151) - and to engage with social and
political issues of ownership, power, identity, exclusion, memory. 'Work emerges
from a particular place, it engages intensively with the history and politics of
that place, and with the resonance of these in the present' (2007, p. 9), permit
ting 'the past to surge into the present' (2006, p. 150).
In regard to a history of colonialism, 'the placial rum' in theory and an
appreciation of complexities of dwelling, occupancy and exclusion are signi
ficant in demonstrating the ethical responsibilities of sire-specific practices,
particularly those 'involved in activating and articulating the memories that
circulate in relation to places of trauma' (ibid., pp. 171-2). 'Furthermore,
locally based spectators experience an enhanced kind of creative agency in char
their knowledge of the place and its history may well be deeper than that of
the performance makers, and they will continue eo frequent the place after the
performers have left' (2007, p. 9).
Canadian scholar Karhleen Irwin also emphasizes the human dimension.
For her, site-specific performance is 'extrapolated from the specificities of the
site itself and, importantly, the communities that claim ownership of it' (lrwin,
2007, pp. 10-11). But it retains the capacity to unsettle and disturb: 'where
physical traces of a building's past operate metaphorically to render absent
present and function to introduce the spectator into other worlds and dimen
sions of our world that are other. The material traces evoke worlds that are
intangible and unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagina
tion, affect and insight' (ibid., p. 37).
Drawing upon her practical experiences as a member of Exeter-based com
pany Wrights and Sires, Cathy Turner concurs with the creative potency of an
uneasy fit. For her: 'each occupation, or traversal, or transgression of space
offers a reinterpretation of it, even a rewriting' (Turner, 2004, p. 373). In
addition, 'the "ghost" is transgressive, defamiliarising, and incoherent' (ibid.,
p. 374), creating a fruitful disjuncture. She characterizes sire-specific perform
ance as a 'range of lens'. Its critical appreciation, apprehension and account
requires:

n A rhetoric that situates us not as within but as elements of the space

of site-specific performance.
"' A vocabulary which provides better metaphors for the eo-creative
aspects of inter-subjectivity.
t3 A greater emphasis on phenomenological experience.
0 A greater emphasis on social interaction, including play. (ibid., p. 379)
In addressing the provisionality and contingency of ephemeral practices based
upon other than architectonic principles, she appeals to psychoanalysis:

By referring to this body of work. one need nor return to notions of either site
or self as fixed or finite entitles. One need not imply an unproblematic notion
of a located setf. or a resolution of the tension between conceptual and reat
sites. Qne need not make an absolute distinction between material and human
objectS. (ibid.)

She favours the inclusivity of Winnicott's 'potential space' (ibid.) within which
all elements, human and material, are envisaged as eo-creative.
In both her critical and artistic work Dee Heddon has concentrated upon the
local and personal: 'performances that fold or unfold autobiography and place,
particularly outside places, I have conceptualised them as being autotopo
graphic' (Heddon, 2008, p. 90). She suggests '"autotopography" renders the
self of the place, and the place of the self, transparent' (ibid., p. 15). Her writing
juxtaposes 'the factual with the fictional, event with imagination, history with
stoty, narrative with fragment, past with present' (ibid., p. 9), in order to 'wrire
place'.ln their latest joint project'The Art of Walking: An Embodied Practice',
Heddon and Turner ser out tq challenge walking in landscape as'male, sqJitary
and self reliant', 'rhapsodic and epiphatic' (Wylie, 2005, p. 235).
Architect Jane Rendell characterizes her 'site-writing' as a form of site
specifidcritical spatial practice:

To achieve its objective the research brings spatial understandings from a number
of disciplines to spatialize the concepts/processes/subjects of writing through an
exploration of the relationship between the materiaVcultural/political qualities of
the site, the associated sites remembered/dreamed/Imagined by the writer. and
the spaces of writing itself. (Rendell, 2009; see also 20 I 0, forthcoming)

Miwon Kwon's sustained examination of practices with roots in the

visual arts are broadly illuminating, particularly as she elaborates ways in
which 'our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed, physical location
to somewhere or something constituted through social, economic, cultural
and political processes' (Kwon, quoted in Doherty, 2004, p. 10) and from -

phenomenologically orientated practices to 'an "intertexmally" coordinated,

multiply-located, discursive field of operation' (Doherty, 2004, p. 30). Site
specific practices:

initially took site as an actual location, a tangible reality 'its identity composed
of a unique combination of physical elements: length, depth, height, texture, and
shape of walls and rooms; scale and proportion of plazas, buildings, or parks;
existing conditions of lighting, ventilation, traffic patterns; distinctive topographi
cal features, and so forth. (Kwon, 2004, p. 11)
 12 SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE

They were:

initially based In a phenomenologicaf or experiential understanding of site,

defined primarily as an agglomeration of the actual attributes of a particular
ioeatlon (the size, soale, texture, and dimension of walls, ceilings, rooms; existing
lighting conditions, topographioal features, traffic patter ns, seasonal oharacteris
tics of dimate, etc.), with architecture serving as a foil for th e artwork In many
instances. (ibid., p. 3)

Current perceptions of site have moved 'from a physical location -grounded,

fiXed, actual- to a discursive vector- ungrounded, fluid, virrual' (ibid., pp. 29--30),
ffectively relocating meaning from the art object to the contingencies of con
-t_
text. Kwon adds: 'it can be hteral, hke a street corner, or virtual, ltke a tlieoreti-
'cal concept' (iOid., p. 3).
Kwon identifies ree aradi s for practice:J
1
7I
enomenological, s bciaY
institutional and i ursive. But she stresses that this is not a progressive
chronological o r&fi ng: 'rather they are competing definitions, overlapping
with one another and operating simultaneously in various cultural practices
today (or even within a single artist's single project)' (ibid., p. 30). All involve
'an inextricable, indivisible relationship between the work and its site' (ibid.,
p. 12), the work addressing 'the site itself as another medium, as an "other
language"' (ibid., p. 75). Whilst site-specific art might constitute a form of
institutional critique and more intense engagement with the everyday world,

it has the capacity to articulate and cultivate local particularities, accentuating

) difference in the face of globalizing tendencies. However, it may also work in
) opposition to the constraints of context so that the work cannot be read as an
affirmation of'questionable ideologies and political power' (ibid.).
Contemporary societal deterritorialization and the fluidiry of a migratory
model of experience introduce 'possibilities for the productiQ!l of multiple iden
tities, allegiances, and meanings, based not on normative conformities but on
the non-rational convergences forged by chance encounters and circumstances'
(ibid., p. 165), producing 'symptoms not codes', or 'spaces of affect' understood
in contrast to 'effecting space' (Hauptmann, 2006, p. 11). Nevertheless we may
maintain 'a secret adherence to the actualiry of places': 'Despite the prolifera
tion of discursive sites and fictional selves, however, the phantom of a site as an
actual place remains, and our psychic, habitual attachment to places regularly
returns as it continues to inform our sense of identiry' (Kwon, 2004, p. !65).
It is not a matter of choosing sides, between models of nomadism and
sedentariness, 'berween space and place, between digital inrerfaces and the
handshake': 'This means addressing the uneven conditions of adjacencies and
distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment
next to another, rather than invoking equivalences via one thing after another'
(ibid., p. 166).

thts. : ; ; ,
There are here echoes of Nicholas Bourriaud's conception of relational aes
Wit in relati nal pra tkes t e nature o the enc unter nda tal,

..sl.l..l.,l,l I It
,
1

1W ..
 INTRODUCTION 13

aiming at the 'formal construction of space-time entities that may be able to

elude alienation, the division of labour, the commodification of space and the
reification of life' {Bourriaud, 2004, p. 48), encouraging 'moments of sociabil
iry' (Bourriaud, 1998, p. 33). 'The political value of the relational aesthetic lies
in rwo very simple observations: social realiry is the product of negotiation
and democracy is a montage of forms' (ibid.). So site may be produced through
;md in interaction, momentarily. Relations maKe"spa-can OCCUrring
within them: 'place as form--eclout of the specifidry of interacting social rela
tions in a particular location; place as meeting place' {Massey, 1994, p. 168).
Misha Myers's performances (see p. 27) in Plymouth 'activate and invite
modes of participation' (Myers, 2009, pp. 107ff.). Her shared and remote
walks, within which the knowledgeable participant or percipient can alter and
determine outcomes, encourage convivialiry and companionabiliry, particu
larly wirh disadvantaged communities. Those present are asked to recall other
times and places that become projected upon and are part of the ciryscape
traversed in performance.
In appreciating the shift from attitudes regarding site as vacant space
awaiting performance, the appearance of new kinds of informational site in
changing technological circumstances, and the role of human agency in place
making in a transitory moment of absorption of actors and things and an
intensification of affect, the perceptions of cognate disciplines such as geogra-.
phy and anthropology, are instructive for both the critical apprehension of and
creative initiatives in performance.
In human geography, the new mobilities paradigm aims 'at going beyond
the imagery of "terrains" asspatially geographical containers for social proc
esses' (Sheller and Urry, 2006, p. 209). It is a reflection upon the effects of
deterritorialization and nomadism - the increasing flow and travel of people,
information and image- whilst acknowledging that in movement not everyone
n the same way. Connections ofsocoal hfe, it os proposed, are organised
through certain nodes:

Mobillties thus entail distinct social spaces that orchestrate new forms of social
life around such nodes, for example, stations, hotels, motorways, resorts, airports,
leisure complexes, cosmopolitan cities, beaches, galleries. and roadside parks.
Or connections might be enacted through less privileged spaces, on the street
corners, subway stations, buses, public plazas and back alleys where the less
privileged might use pay-phones, beepers, or more recently short-text messaging
to organize illicit exchanges, meetings, political demonstrations or 'underground'
social gatherings. (ibid., p. 213)

Places are thus not so much fixed as implicated within complex networks by
which hosts, guests, buildings, objects, and machinery are contingently brought

fsp )
together to produce certain performances in certain places at certain times.
Places are about relationships, about the placing of peoples, materials, images and
the ms ffere that erlor .
''
1 s!
 At the same time as places are dynamic, they are also about proxlmities, about
the bodily copresence of people who happen to be in that place at that time,
doing activities together. (ibid., p. 21 4)

There are then new kinds of site, more or less stable, within and through
which performance might be enacted - and new kinds of (performative) rela
tionship within and through which sire might {temporally) materialize.
Also in geography, Nigel Thrifs 11011-represe11tatio11al theory is towards
'the geography of what happens' (Thrift, 2008, p. 2). it concerns movement:
'movement captures a certain attitude to life as potential' {ibid., p. 5). In sum, it
attends to the 'onllow' of everyday life. It concentrates on practices 'understood
as material bodies of work or sryles that have gained enough stability over time,
through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized
devices to reproduce themselves' (ibid., p. 8); as well as upon 'the vast spillage
of things'; 'Things answer back' (ibid., p. 9). It is experimental. It stresses affect
and sensation. And it returns to consideration of space.
In addressing tl\e consequences of technological advance, Thrift sees no
reason to reduce everyday experience and undersranding of spatial complexiry
to 'a problematic of "scale"': 'Actors continually change size. A multipliciry of
"scales" is always present in interactions' (ibid., p. 17). There is a prolifera
tion of the 'actor's spaces that can be recognised and worked with', redefining
'what counts as an actor' (ibid.).
Although demanding in its range of references, Thrift's work concerns per
formance. It is about dealing with the everyday as it comes at us, as sophisti
cated social improvisation in a thinned out world, 'whereby a given locale is
linked indifferently to every {or any) other place in global space' (Casey, 2001,
p. 406) and where we no longer know quite how to go on but are always 'on
the go', where regulated or habitual practices may prove ineffective.
Significant concepts related to 'performance' in the work of geographers such
as John Wylie and Hayden Lorimer are creative practice, moc!e of representa
tion, embodied enquiry and analytical trope and affect {'an intensiry, a field
perhaps of awe, irritation or sereniry which exceeds, enters into, and ranges
over the sensations and emotions of a subject who sees' (Wylie, 2005, p. 236);
'the augmentation or diminution of a body's capacity to act, to engage, and to
connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive- that
is aliveness or vitality' (Clough, 2007, p. 2)). They undertake performative
activities and they write of the sensual and physical experience in situations
where materialities, motilities and corporealities are of equal account.
In 2002 Wylie conducted a.gtj_UC'l)k along.a20lhmlk_stretcb of the South
West Coast Path (Wylie, 2005). His account 'aims to describe some of the dif
ferential configurations of self and landscape emergent within the performa
tive milieu of coastal walking' (p. 236). Hayden Lorimer, in his research on
'sies of special interest', focuses on:

notable or overlooked landscape features (e.g. paths, gates, stiles, dykes and walls,
flagstone steps, sheep pens, cattle grids, shooting butts, bus shelters, bothies,
 "
IN n\ODUCTI\.JN 1:;,

scarecrows, gang-huts). Such folk geographies of things-in-places would focus

on narratives, tales, memories and material remains of the not-so-distant past.
(Lorimer,2009)

Both have noted a resurgence in popular topographical writing in Britain

pursuant upon the success and pervasive influence of W. G. Sebald, whose
Rings of Sat11m (1999) traces a long-distance walk in Norfolk. In Waterlog
(1999) Roger Deakin swims across England. In The Wild Places (2007) Robert
Mcfarlane visits inaccessible locations. In Connemara: Listerzing to the Wind

Ireland._ Each has performative aspec

(2007)1im Robinson continues his detailed mapping of ol}ll region in western
g:"Each is a per-
s c of expertenceanooff!lace.
--

Both have ac now e ged the work ofi\merican anthropologist Kathleen

Stewart, particularly her attempts at 'narrativizing a local cultural real'
(Stewart, 1996, p. 3) in coal-mining communities in West Virginia. Stewart
invites the reader to imagine a deprived community through its own under
standings of place and the memories they enshrine:

lt tells its story through interruptions, amassed densities of description, evo

cation of voices and the conditions of their possibility, and lyrical, ruminative
aporias that give pause.
lt fashions Itself as a tendon between interpretation and evocation,mimicking
the tension in culture between the disciplinary and the imaginary. (ibid., p. 7)

Her work is 'a dwelling in and on a cultural poetics contingent on a place and
a time and in-filled with palpable desire' {ibid., p. 4).

.
This resonats with the lined ideas that anthroologist- Jt f

ng outlines
-

m Tbe PerceptiOII of the E11VITOII111ent (2000), whJch have oeenw.dely taken

up in associated fields:

periences it affors to thowhcw;p

time theree sights,sounds andlndee<nm-eilstliat constitute its specific
And these,In tum, depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhab
itants engagelational cE. llt..Qf_p_!op's engagement witll.Jh...<L.
_ plac., _dl<!ws]:CS:-il]i@e slgryjfl_cance. t
..wodd.l!Je business of dwelling, tJi"Zech
(lbid.,p.l92}_________ _ _ -- --

For lngold, landscape is also taskscape: a work-in-progress, perpetually

under construction. It is a matrix of movement, with distinct places as nodes
bound together by the itineraries of inhabitants (ibid., p. 219). It is differenti
ated, but it bener resembles a network of related places, some revealed through
our habitual acrions, some through familiarity and affinity and some through
particular moments and events stored in communal memory. Moving between
places, wayfi11di11g, more closely resembles story-telling than map-using, as one
situates one's position within the context of journeys previously made: 'every
place holds within it memories of previous arrivals and departures, as well as
1 CS SITE-SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE
-- ------- -------

expectations of how one may reach ir, or reach other places from it' (ibid.,
p. 227). Perceiving landscape is rhus 'to carry out an act of remembrance'
(ibid., p. 189); 'places do nor have locations but histories' {ibid., p. 219).
T here is no privilege of origin: a place owes its character nor only to the
experiences it affords as sights, sounds, etc. bur also to what is done there as
looking, listening, moving. Both 'being' and environment are mutually emer
gent, continuously brought into existence together. And here performance might
represent a place of work or special moment within landscape (see Pearson,
2006a, pp. 152-62).
Site then is also a function of the social: 'Topopbilia is the affective bond
between people and place or setting' (Tuan, 1974, p. 4):

anotion of place where specifldty (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives

not from some mythical internal roots nor from history of relative isolation -
not to be disrupted by Isolation - but from the absolute particularity of the
mixture of Influences found together there. (Massey, 1999, p. 18)
"

And here site-specific performance may not only highlight such investment,
such heterogeneity, it may also become a lasting parr of the story of that place:
'potentially constitutive of aspects of the world' (Myers, 2009, p. 34).

Provisional distinctions

Given an expanded notion of site - 'reimagining place as a situation, a set of

circumstances, geographical location, historical narrative , group of people or
social agenda' (Doherry, 2004, p. 9)- and an extended range of practices, can
anything then be said, in general, to define site-specific performance?
Whilst 'that undertaken in non-theatrical spaces' is now barely adequate,
the auditorium might yet provide a control, an abstracted set of conditions,
against which to extrapolate the particularities of site work, all that might
absorb and impact upon practice (whilst acknowledging that the auditorium
is itself a site, equally susceptible to conceptual readdress):

t:1 The auditorium is cloistered. n At site, bounds and perimeters

tJ In the auditorium environmen
tal conditions are stable.
Ll The auditorium is dark and
quiet.
may be extant or installed.
!:! At site, environmental condi
tions may change and need to be
accepted or actively countered.
L2 Site is only dark or q uier if cho
sen for such qualities or ren I
t
dered so.

'

In the auditorium performance
is scheduled.
lJ In the auditorium performance
is located in one place.
B In the auditorium the arrange
ment of the audience is fixed.
L:J In the auditorium, the audience
is casras audience: purposefully
assembled, expectant, disposed,
potentially appreciative.
<l In the auditorium the audience
may have been before.
In the auditorium the scene is
singular.
m In the auditorium events occur
in the middle distance.
m In the auditorium effects are
confined and controlled.
' In the auditorium the machin
ery of production pre-exists
performance.
Cl In the auditorium artifice is
disguised.
m In the auditorium established
techniques are more or less suffi
cient to the rask of production.
In the auditorium one thing
of singular importance is
happening.
t?i The ,auditorium is designed to
facilitate repetition.
L In the auditorium previous occu
pations are erased.
In the auditorium this sort of
thing has happened before.
INTRODUCTION 'I 7
At site, there may be a transi
tory discontinuity in the social
fabric.
'" At site, performance may be
distributed as moments of rhet
oric inrensicy.
At site, there may be multiple
dispositions: organized; fluid;
negotiated in performance ...
u At site, the audience may be
incidental -.those present in the
same place at the same rime -
and obdurate.
'" At site there are no regular the
atregoers. If they have bem )
before, it is in another guise. I.:J .,
rJ At site, the prospect is complex
unless otherwise framed.
!2 At site, events occur at varying
and changing distances.
tl At site, effects may intrude and
compete for attention.
E At site, it may be installed or
modified from that otherwise
existing, or rendered surplus to
requirements.
At site, performance is in plain
view unless masked.
t:l At site, techniques may be
invented or appropriated.
il At site, many things may be
happening: performance may
need to establish and proclaim
its own presence.
t2 At site, there maybe no recourse,
no second chance.
!:l At site, they are evident and
operative, though not necessar
ily alluded to.
tJl At site, it is always as if for the
first time.